Insight and Discussion Concerning What’s Important in BC

Month: February 2017

The ongoing practice of lying to the public, then deliberately ignoring the fallout (or issuing a half-hearted apology) must be severely punished by voters – in the most appropriate way possible.

Kick the liars out of office – or don’t allow them to get there in the first place.

I’m sick of the constant bickering, half-truths and outright lies attempting to deceive a public that is only marginally capable of separating truth from fiction after barrage upon barrage of partisan and biased disinformation.

The sad reality is that we, the voting public, have been deliberately de-sensitized by incessant half-truths, speculation offered as truth, obfuscation, misrepresentation, spin-doctoring – and sometimes plain and simple, outright lies.

Canadians look across the border at the US and the increasing dysfunctionality of a two party political system that is apparently unable to meet in the middle on any issues of importance. To fuel the fire, each side is continuously offering up outrageous and improbable statements that any sixth grader can discern as a substantial and deliberate misrepresentation of facts and reality.

Unfortunately, we, in Canada, and in this instance, British Columbia, are no strangers to politicians and political parties bending the truth (at best) and outright lying – at their self-serving worst.

Recently, our premier showed her own ethical shortcomings by suggesting that the nefarious, nasty NDP had ‘hacked‘ the BC Liberal Party website for the purposes of obstensibly affecting the outcome of the forthcoming 2017 election.

What Christy and her cronies failed to mention or acknowledge was that the website, openly available to the public through a public domain, had a security blunder of monumental proportions that allowed anyone able to type and read to click on an ‘upload’ tab and retrieve any and all documents that were stored – in the open without even the most basic security.

Rather than investigating the source of the ‘leak’ and dealing with their own internal ineptitude, Christy and her cronies immediately, and unethically, held a public news conference to announce that the NDP and John Horgan had ‘hacked‘ the website – without a smidgen of proof or justification.

For her own political ends, Christy Clark essentially lied to the public through the media. Even when Vicki Huntington, an independent MLA, advised that she had forwarded the security breech to the media, our ethically questionable Premier took her time to acknowledge the truth and offer her half-hearted apology to the NDP.

This is, of course, not the first time that the matter of data security, indeed data preservation, has been shown to be a major ethical shortcoming in the office of the Premier. We only have to look back a couple of years at the deliberate and thorough destruction of documents and data within the very office of the Premier to ensure that potentially politically embarassing information did not become a matter of public discussion.

Where is the ethics commissioner while all of this dirty and unethical political practice is occurring? And why do politicians think that they can lie to the public -without impunity and without consequences?

Look in the mirror. The answer is plain and simple. We allow them to act in an unethical manner. We, the public, have become complicit and are equally, perhaps more, responsible than the lying politicians themselves.

Why? Because we have the means and the ability to ensure that this deceit and unacceptable practice ceases.

We simply vote the perpetrators of this sleazy ‘new normal‘ behaviour out of office. We kick them out of their lofty, entitled taxpayer-funded nest. We send them home with their tail between their legs. We call them out and hold them accountable.

We make them ‘own it’. That is the only way that we, the public, will be able to effect meaningful change.

By holding politicians, and aspiring politicians, to account. For their own good. For the good of the province. For the good of future politicians and future generations who should be taught ethical practices in the hopes that the integrity and accountability of government and politicians can be restored in the minds of an ever-increasingly cynical and disenchanted public.

Post Script

Although they are little more than a fading blip on the radar, the BC Conservative Party has once again shown itself to be a completely unacceptable (and wholly unsupportable) third party option for the BC voter.

In addition to the myriad documented unethical and demonstrably unsupportable practices and decisions made by the inner cadre that has hijacked a political party that would, under other circumstance, be a viable option for BC voters, the current BCCP Board of Directors is promoting it’s own, latest lie.

The BCCP website has a new posting that proudly, and falsely, touts that its own website has not been hacked – and that appropriate security measures are in place to ensure that the website and the database “information will be used only by those people who are authorized to do so for normal party purposes“.

This is a blatant, deliberate and self-serving lie. The individuals who have offered this complete misrepresentation of the facts know full well that their own website and database was unethically, and perhaps illegally accessed, during the past leadership campaign – after which, ironically, the BCCP remains leaderless.

We have confirmation from a number of trusted sources that a number of alleged database irregularities and website manipulation instances have arisen in recent months and years – a fact that is only furthering the disintegration and the internal destruction of the BC Conservative Party. The individuals making the false statement about the BC Conservative Party data security know, without doubt, that they are issuing false and misleading statements to the public in the hopes of maintaining their own precarious hold on a political party that is currently in its death throes in the very year that a provincial general election is taking place.

The only saving grace is that very few voters in BC, outside of the incestuous inner circle of the BCCP, actually care about the BCCP data, or the BC Conservative Party itself.

Treat the lies of politicians, and would be politicians, with the contempt and disdain that lies (and liars) deserve.

Find political candidates and alternatives to the corruption and unsupportable unethical practices of at least two of the political parties vying for your vote in the 2017 election.

Consider the merits of true accountability to you, the voter. Put self-serving, unethical political candidates and ‘wannabees’ back where they belong – on the outside, looking in – on responsible, ethical accountable government from responsible, ethical and accountable elected MLA’s.